TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR RESEARCH CAREER. WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN WORKING ON?
Welcoming Our New Leader Gregory D. Abowd joined Northeastern University as Dean of the College of Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in March 2021. Prior to Northeastern, he was a Regents’ Professor and held the J.Z. Liang Chair in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also served as Associate Dean of Research and Space for the College of Computing. Abowd is an internationally renowned and highly cited scientist, well known for his contributions in the general area of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and specifically for his groundbreaking research in ubiquitous computing. View Dr. Abowd’s full background
coe.northeastern.edu/people/abowd-gregory
Well, in general, when I got to Georgia Tech, I was a particular kind of researcher and I changed rather drastically. Within a year, I was very much influenced by the writings and vision of [computer scientist] Mark Weiser, who is considered the founding father of ubiquitous computing. His vision was a form of computing that was off the desktop, that included a sensor-based exploration of what our world might be like. And this was a vision that he expressed in the late 1980s! It was a vision of what our world might be like if computers became more prevalent than they were at that time, if they were more than just desktops and personal devices—if they became more part and parcel of our everyday activity and were embedded in our physical environment in such a way that we didn’t even notice where they were all the time. I was revisiting that vision around 2015-2016, in the context of new technological capabilities, particularly in additive manufacturing, and in the development of nanoelectronic devices. COULD YOU EXPLAIN THAT A BIT MORE? Yeah, so let’s take the phrase “internet of things.” So, when we say “internet of things” today, it’s typically about taking existing pieces of technology and adding a network capability to them so they can connect with other pieces of technology. We are not talking about say, a Post-It note, or a cup, or a shirt, or a pair of glasses; we’re not thinking about what comes to mind for most people when you say “thing.” I’m interested in making things—entities that we are familiar with in our everyday physical world—that have the capabilities of sensing, computing, and communicating, so that you can achieve Weiser’s vision. He had two very eloquent sentences at the beginning of his book, “The Computer for the Twenty-First Century.” He writes, “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life, until they are indistinguishable from it.” He meant that metaphorically, but you can actually start to think about that more literally, by manufacturing computational capabilities into “things”; by literally weaving them in or manufacturing them as part of how you produce a piece of paper or Post-It note. That’s what I mean, that’s what we’ve been exploring in my lab, and it’s starting to grow around the world, this whole notion of computational materials. THINKING BIG PICTURE, WHAT ARE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES OR ISSUES IN THE WORLD TODAY THAT YOU’RE EAGER TO ENCOURAGE NORTHEASTERN STUDENTS TO DIG INTO? Oh, there’s a ton of them. Data engineering is a huge industry, the cloud, and Big Data, and all that. And big companies are investing a lot of money, to the tune of maybe a billion dollars a month, to maintain and build data centers. And this is projected to be something like 20 percent of the world’s energy supply to feed the power needs of these data centers. So that is seriously an engineering challenge to say, “How can we reduce the energy reliance for what appears to be an insatiable desire to get more data, and to handle that more data and to infer more things from that data?” That’s why I’m so interested in these kinds of self-sustaining computational solutions. But more important is what this allows us to do. In parts of the world where power is not an assumed resource, you need self-sustainable capabilities. And, the price of computers, as much as it’s gone down, is still not inexpensive. So to address those kinds of grand-scale problems, you really do need very cheap, selfSPRING 2021 | Engineering @ Northeastern 1
